Organizations such as corporations typically own and/or at least maintain a network environment including network resources such as routers, data storage devices, computers, applications, etc., to support different corporate functions. All or part of the network resources (e.g., servers, routers, computers, etc.) of the local network environment may reside within a building owned or leased by the company. Additionally, corporate network domains and corresponding resources can span multiple geographical regions. Appropriate management resources are typically needed to maintain and configure the network.
An example of a management resource that may be present in a corporate network environment is Active Directory (by Microsoft™). In general, Active Directory is a resource to store information and settings for a deployment in a central database and allows administrators to assign policies as well as deploy and update software in a network environment. Active Directory networks can vary from a small installation with a few computers, users, and printers to many thousands of users, many different network domains, and large server farms spanning many geographical locations.
In many cases, a network administrator controls configuration settings of the corporate network environment for each employee in the company via input to the directory. The configuration settings can include employee information as well as indicate what functions each of the employees can perform, access, etc. Configuration settings for the different employees may vary depending on a number of factors such as the title of the employee, job duties of the employee, years of employee experience, functional group to which the employee belongs, etc.
Corporations may require use of third party services that are only available and/or cost-effective if they are obtained from a third party service provider's network. Employees may have to access the third party service provider network to obtain services.
A third party service provider may provide services to a number of different subscriber companies. A network administrator for each of the subscriber companies typically provides configuration information for each of their employees to indicate which of one or more functions available from the third party service provider can be performed by each of the employees.
In certain cases, the configuration information (such configuration settings stored in or accessible to the Active Directory) defining access capabilities of employees in the corporate network environment may be at least partially relied upon for controlling user settings with respect to functionality in the third party service provider.
Even though common configuration settings can be used to define access capability in both the local network environment (e.g., within a corporation's firewall) and the third party service provider environment, the network administrator may have to keep track of and manually provide duplicate configuration settings to multiple different sites. For example, the network administrator may need to store and maintain employee configuration settings in a resource such as an Active Directory to control access within a corporate firewall as well as store and maintain similar or the same information in a storage resource in the third party service provider's network located external to the corporate firewall to control access to resources in the third party service provider's network.